


The Senator of Arkanis

by NebulousMistress



Series: Let Slip the Hounds of the First Order [6]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Canon-Typical Speciesism, Gen, Monsters, New Republic Politics, Pre-Star Wars: The Force Awakens, casual nudity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-01
Updated: 2020-07-01
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:00:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25018171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NebulousMistress/pseuds/NebulousMistress
Summary: Senator Leopold Shae retired in disgrace. Pity, at least he was human. Rumor has it Arkanis has put forward one of those monstrous natives as their new Senator.
Series: Let Slip the Hounds of the First Order [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1698706
Comments: 6
Kudos: 29





	The Senator of Arkanis

**Author's Note:**

> Meanwhile on Hosnian Prime...

The Senate building on Hosnian Prime was not what it seemed. A long low building of one single story laid upon the topmost surface of the ecumenopolis. One story meant nobody stood above anyone else, every Senator of every planet afforded the exact same accommodations. The exact same importance. Equality among the worlds of the New Republic, whether they be Coruscant or Kashyyyk, Taris or Tatooine, Bespin or Batuu. Every planet held equal sway, equal power, equal voice in the Senate of the New Republic.

But some planets were more equal than others.

The Senate Chambers themselves extended down into the lower levels below the topmost surface, modeled after the Senate so beloved of the previous Republic. Height no longer determined the importance of individual planets.

Now it was distance.

The long low building of the Senate sprawled as wide as a Star Destroyer across the topmost surface, the Senate itself in the middle. Any individual planet’s power was measured in distance from the center, same as it always had been before the Empire.

The Core Worlds kept their Senatorial apartments around the center, ringing the Senate Chambers themselves like a wall of opulence. Those worlds traditionally considered to be humanity’s first Colony Worlds clung to that opulence, bathing in the cast-offs of the Core. Then the Rim Worlds, individual motes of color and power separating from the opulent Core and spreading out into the rare jewels of the Inner Rim, the Expansion Regions, the Mid Rim, and finally the Outer Rim.

Lady Carise Sindian stood on the balcony of her apartment in the sprawling Senate complex. Hosnian Prime’s moon hung low on the horizon, the pale crescent grinning silently in the starless, light-polluted sky. Night had fallen on the Senate and her balcony felt like the insult it was surely meant to be.

Only those apartments furthest from the Senate Chambers **had** balconies. Her particular balcony overlooked a dropoff down between the layers of the ecumenopolis. Far below her a line of speeders traced orange lights as commuters sped from work to entertainment then back to work. There was no slavery on Hosnian Prime but this was a Core World and those on the lowest levels often had a choice: drown in debt to capitalist masters or retreat into the undercity to evolve in darkness.

The Lady knew which she would choose.

She was Senator of Arkanis and unlike her predecessor, Senator Leopold Shae, she was not human. Once her own ancestors had evolved in darkness, shedding their humanity in exchange for their own survival on a hostile dark world ruled by rains and swamps and deep punishing seas. Once they rose to conquer a sector, ruling the Regency for thousands of years longer than any Republic or Sith Empire. This punishment was a temporary setback, nothing more. If the galaxy wanted Arkanis back then they would have her and all that that meant.

*****

The soiree was exactly what Lady Carise expected it would be.

The antechamber and ballroom were bathed in soft oranges and yellows from strings of tiny sparkling lights strung like stars. Protocol droids shuffled about, apologizing profusely in delicate voices as they attempted to keep up with their owners. Servants carried platters of hors d'oeuvres and trays of fluted wine glasses through the throngs of dozens of different species.

Looking closer it was easy to see past the veneer of this place. The New Republic claimed to be a bastion of new peace, an answer to the human-centric Imperial system. A restoration of the very same Republic that spawned the Imperial system itself. A ‘new tolerance’ as it had been called. A tolerance for the existence of others. A tolerance for their voices daring to question humanity’s durasteel grip on galactic politics. So long as that question never required an answer...

She could see it from here. Humans made up the majority of the Senators here, all mingling freely in great streams of silk and velvet and precious metals. Even many nonhuman worlds presented human Senators in an attempt to conform. The few nonhuman Senators kept to themselves, a barrier of the large and strong forming protective bubbles to keep the weak and wary hidden away like creche-cubs.

Servants kept offering her little plates with human delicacies.

Carise plucked a flute of wine from a tray and brought it to her lips. She sneered at the taste, a sour note that she instinctively disliked. The bubbles suspended in the wine added to her disgust, disguising the soft sweetness of alcohol under a thick veneer of sour civility.

There was nothing civil about this farce.

Human Senators displayed their dominance over the rest of the galaxy, flaunting it in the food, the drink, the decorations. Soft tapestries in dull visual-band colors hung from the walls. Between those tapestries one might still see the sprawling ecumenopolis spread out to the horizon, a human-colonized planet-city much like Coruscant itself. This was a world of humanity, by humanity, for humanity.

Karkarodons lurked in the shadows under great breathing masks to keep their gills wet. Wookies roared and growled and whined while protocol droids attempted to keep up. Small peeping Chadra-Fan ran underfoot, trying to avoid the pounding feet. A pair of Noghri hissed in disappointment at the edibles on offer, snarling in hunger and pacing about in a distress that the Lady Carise knew all too well. The Gran Senator saw it too and stayed far away from the hungry predators.

Through it all the humans flowed, filling every available space. Cloaks and capes billowed behind them as they stalked and strode and pounded their feet against the pale white marble. Dresses draped from the shoulders of men and women and those of indeterminate gender. Headdresses of piled braids and shining gems dangled in uncomfortable-looking displays. Metals draped necks and wrists like armor of woven chains. 

Carise knew she looked dull to them. Her silks shimmered in a spectrum the humans couldn’t see but left the Twi’leks entranced and had the Wookies purring in appreciation. Pale opal silks draped from her shoulders like wings behind her, framing her jet black hair combed back and left free in its crest. The straps that kept her silks tight around her hips and breasts cinched her form in ways the humans appreciated.

And yet, through it all she moved like they did. Years of practice taught her how to move like them, talk like them, to look like them. The yellow lenses she wore in delicate wire frames balanced on her nose tinted her vision, though that wasn’t their purpose. Rather she wore them to give the humans something to focus on aside from her wide brown eyes, so dark her pupils were almost invisible with no sclera to speak of. Even her patterns matched a human ideal of beauty, her skin a single golden brown spot woefully without interesting variation and with only a minimal flushing reaction.

She looked like they did.

Raucous laughter drew her attention. Old human women stood together gossiping about the past misdeeds of the men in their lives. Carise would have ignored them if not for who they were. As Senator of Arkanis she had a duty to perform and that duty was to be seen at this festival of human hubris and alien acquiescence.

Carise approached the old women, Chancellor Mon Mothma and Senator Leia Organa, her half-empty wine glass still in hand. Chancellor Mothma wore a pale opalescent dress of Arkanan silks, though it couldn’t have been sewn by anyone of any skill. The iridescent patterns in the fabric were sideways, the luminescence would cluster all on one bunched side if ever the dress got wet. Senator Organa still wore the mourning wools of her Alderaan, black and gray and heavy. Neither woman noticed her, just another human in a sea of humans.

“You should be off, Leia,” Mothma said. “You said something earlier about your son?”

“I will, I will, I promise.” Leia deftly placed her empty flute on a passing tray and plucked a full one with the same motion. “I’ll leave as soon as I meet the new Senator from Arkanis. Whatever happened to Leopold? I found him to be quite the…” She cleared her throat and covered it with a drink from her fresh glass.

“He was something,” Mothma drawled. “I believe the Arkanans distrusted him.”

Carise interjected herself into the conversation. They were, after all, discussing her own home planet and her responsibility. “Senator Leopold was encouraged to retire,” she said, carefully enunciating the syllables of Galactic Basic like it was a second language. “He felt it the better deal than facing down a vote of no confidence.”

“I wonder why,” Leia mused.

“It was believed a human couldn’t possibly represent Arkanis in the Senate,” Carise said. It was a nice way of putting it. In truth, the human Senator Leopold had been appointed to represent Arkanis by this Senate itself. His first acts opened Arkanis to exploitation by human influences from the Core Worlds for the benefit of the Chancellor’s politics. The damage had been done with domed cities blocking out the rain. Soon cloud seeding would begin in an attempt to dry out the atmosphere with no concern for the fungal forests that would shrivel beneath the glare of two suns.

“I thought the Arkanans were humans,” Leia said.

“They are,” Mothma said in a tone that allowed for no argument.

“Some of them might look human, at least,” Carise allowed. “But I wouldn’t go so far as to call them ‘humans’.”

“I would,” Mothma snapped. She took a deep breath and instead settled into what sounded like a familiar lecture. “I believe any native Arkanan would agree with me. They were humans when they colonized Arkanis in the first place, they’re still humans now. No matter how strange they look, no matter how far they’ve… evolved.” She swallowed hard as though the word was distasteful. “We have to remember that. All of us.”

Carise bristled, her crest rising along her spine. “While you may believe they’re human--”

“They are,” Mothma insisted. “No matter how strange they may look.”

“Why, have you ever seen one?” Leia asked.

Mothma didn’t look Leia in the eye. “I have not. But I’ve spoken at length with Senator Leopold. He told me stories of how they keep to themselves and collude with the Hutts. He called them the ‘monsters in the darkness’. Their world is supposed to be a nightmare, I don’t understand how anyone would willingly live there. At least that’s changing.”

“Maybe they don’t wish to be seen then,” Leia sniffed. “Nobody civilized would willingly work with the Hutts.”

“One can work with the Hutts without dancing for them,” Carise drawled. “One might find it quite profitable, if they had the personality necessary to keep that Hutt in check.”

Mon Mothma held her breath and stepped back. Leia drained her flute of wine and handed it off behind her right into the face of a nearby Senator. He took it before she shoved it down his throat. “Who are you?” Leia demanded. “Who do you think you are!”

Carise shook out her crest, letting the black hair down her spine raise like a frill. She pulled the yellow lenses from her eyes, revealing the nearly solid black pits the humans would see. “I am Sssenatorrr CarisssseSssindian of Arrrkanisss,” she said, dropping her attempt at maintaining a human composure to her words. “Chansssellorrr, we mussst dissscusss your ‘one humanity’ initiative, I believe Arkanisss would object to itsss presssumptionsss.”

Leia’s expression had changed, schooled from one of sudden personal rage to a careful calculation. “You’re the Arkanan Senator,” she said, restating what she’d just been told.

Carise smiled like a human would, her teeth bared. She knew her long canines would unnerve the most but her sharp carnassial teeth behind would imply so much more.

“And Chansssellorrr,” Carise allowed. “If you’re going to attempt to imprrressss me with Arkanan sssilksss, do find a tailorrr who can ssssee the pattern they’rrre working with.” 

Carise could feel eyes on her from all sides, eyes that judged and feared and disdained. She twitched her ears to show she knew they were there, a sign she knew those species who still existed within the predator-prey cycle would understand more than these humans. She darted her eyes about the room as the Twi’lek Senator raised his flute of wine and gave a knowing smirk. Wookies huffed and churred, leaving protocol droids to sputter flustered.

“Good night, Chansssellorrr,” Carise purred as she finished her wine. She allowed herself the look of disgust at the sweet sour of the drink before turning and leaving. She slid the empty flute onto a tray then paused and turned as she spotted an hors d'oeuvres tray that contained something she might actually be able to eat. Small crustaceans lay dead and sauced on plates and she lifted a plate from that tray. She ignored solicitations for utensils as she picked up the creature with her bare hand and bit down on its soft shell.

She purred at the taste of cream and butter sauce and the soft sweet flesh of the young crab before giving in and swallowing the crab in large chunks. Nothing remained on the plate that she left on a roving tray before she left.

The Hosnian moon had fallen low to the horizon as she stepped outside. Her dress glowed in wavelengths no human could see under the twilight darkness of the Hosnian light-polluted night. That darkness opened for her as she pulled the yellow lenses away from her night-eyes.

Well, that had been an event. Ex-Senator Leopold had left her with a right mess and now she had to fix it. If she had to make an enemy of the Chancellor then so be it, the Chancellor wouldn’t be in power long. She was already old for a human and her ideas just as old.

This galaxy didn’t belong to humanity. It belonged to those who could take it.

*****

Lady Carise took the long walk back to her apartment, from the ballroom and its antechambers built on top of the Senate Chambers themselves to Arkanis’s exile on the outermost line of apartments in the Complex. She passed by so many jewels of opulence, from the misty fountains of the Alderaanian Diaspora to the lilypad pools of Naboo. The delicate rock gardens of Cato Neimoidia. Bright feathered lizards chained to perches from Cantonica. A wall made of a saltwater aquarium teeming with fish from Mon Cala. Further out the apartments grew more austere, simple artworks to imply the beauty of their worlds. Furthest out there was nothing to distinguish any apartment from any other, bare walls of pale stone and floors of worn marble tiles. Nothing to celebrate, no beauty to speak of.

Her apartment was likewise as bare, the ex-Senator Leopold’s doing no doubt. The man had been a human, an unabashedly Coruscanti human assigned to represent Arkanis as punishment for taking the deal the Empire offered. Punishment was a good explanation for what the Regency had gone through in the previous 2 decades; the Siege, the overthrow of Empress Leeya, the razing of the Imperial Academy, the domed cities, the forced introduction of human crop plants, the invasion of weak and whiny human colonists… Even the last galactic census was suspect, forcibly defining Arkanans as humans and therefore making no distinction between native Arkanan, Alderaanian diaspora, or human colonist.

She stepped inside the blank, bare apartment and didn’t even bother to turn on any lights. She didn’t need them and nor did her attendants. Carise held out her arms, inviting their attention.

Two men stepped forward, their eyes shining in the darkness the same as hers. Her attendants stood long and lean, thin by human standards. Strips of fabric wrapped around their waists and up their torsos to hold their pants on their thin hips but they wore no other clothing. Instead their skin was damp from indulging in the water-shower provided for her use, their spots flushed in pleasing patterns. Evan’s patterns trailed in long lines across his sides like stripes that curled around his body from his neck to his knees, his crest a rich brown with black tips. Dari’s hands and feet were black with hunter’s marks that matched the long black stripe up his spine beneath his crest of black with pale yellow tips.

Their hands slid up her wrists to trail up her arms to her shoulders before unfastening the first layers of silk. Opalescent silk caressed her skin as they removed it from her then carefully folded it. Next the straps, binding straps that kept her form from slinking and twisting like a predator. She purred as the straps were unbound, freeing her spine from the painfully upright posture she had to maintain among humans. 

Carise wasn’t sure who nuzzled first, Evan or Dari, but she welcomed the contact of their faces against her skin, her neck, her own face. Their purr complemented each other’s and hers as the straps dropped unceremoniously to the floor like the chains they were. Finally they reached the clasps at her shoulders holding the silk dress to her body. It dropped like water and she stepped out of it, unabashed at her nudity. One of them picked up the dress to fold and drape it for storage while the other ran his hands over her skin, massaging her shoulders and back in a fruitless attempt to flush her nonexistent spots.

Soon both sets of hands were on her and she purred, laying against one while the other nuzzled her. Hands roamed her skin and her hands roamed theirs, combing through the rough fur of their crests and trailing the long lines of their predatory builds.

“Have you eaten?” she asked.

Evan nuzzled her neck while Dari nuzzled lower, scenting her breasts. “No, my Lady,” Evan purred. “They left human poissson forrr usss…”

Dari followed a smell up her body to her mouth, licking at her lips and the taste he found there. “You found sssomething,” he observed.

“I ssstole a trrreat meant forrr the Mon Calamarrri,” Carise admitted. 

Her attendants murred and hissed, sounds of amused disappointment. Amusement at the theft, disappointment at not only their own hunger but the Lady’s hunger as well. It was an insult. Everything about this Senate appointment was an insult. Their hunger was downright dangerous, as ex-Senator Leopold should have warned them. He hadn’t called native Arkanans the ‘monsters in the darkness’ for no reason.

Carise extracted herself from her attendant’s caresses and padded over to the desk where she was expected to do much of her work. She opened a case and pulled a handheld comm, fitting it in her hand. She activated it.

A hologram of a silver protocol droid sprung up from her hand. “Oh goodness!” it said, raising its hands to its eyes. “Yes, my Lady?”

“I and my attendants have dietary requirements that were not met,” Carise snapped, carefully enunciating the Galactic Basic. “Those requirements were made clear before our arrival. Why were our requirements not met?”

“I’m so terribly sorry, my Lady, but orders were changed.”

“On whose authority!”

“It was an order from the Senate,” the droid insisted. “All humans and their human retinues are to be fed the same as any other human. Arkanans are classified as humans in my system.”

“The human food you sent us is poisonous. Neither my attendants nor myself have eaten since we landed on Hosnian Prime two days ago.”

“Oh dear! I’m terribly sorry, my Lady! Whatever can I do to remedy the situation?”

“Follow your original orders,” Carise ordered. “If anyone, and I mean **anyone** tries to stop you, send them directly to me and then continue to follow your original orders. Do you understand?”

“Yes, my Lady.”

Carise shut off the comm, the bright hologram fading to leave the apartment in comfortable soft darkness once again. The eyeshine of her attendants watched her, just as hers watched them. “Let’ssssee if that worksss,” she said wryly.

“And if it doesssn’t?” Dari asked.

“There’sss alwaysss the Grrran Sssenatorrr,” Carise purred.

Hissing laughter echoed from the apartment as outside the Senate split into groups to gossip, to whisper, to leer, to scheme, and to be scandalized.

*****

When the protocol droid appeared with suitable foodstuffs to stock the apartment kitchen Carise had an entire list of alterations that would be necessary to turn this generic human-ideal apartment into something civilized.

First the bed had to go. Just, gone. All the beds. The main bedroom was plenty large enough but the floor would need to be changed. Pillows, large ones, with water-stable stuffing. At least three humidifiers, the air in the bedroom was far too dry. Only the main bedroom needed them, the other bedrooms would best be repurposed for other things.

This idea of a dining table needed to go, as did the chairs. A low table with large pillows for sitting and lounging should replace the whole set.

The sonic shower was an affront to civilized existence. The idea of water rationing was unhealthy and completely unsafe for any native to a swampy world. In fact, was there any way to get a mudbath in here? Not one of those sterile clay monstrosities that Core World Senators indulged in, more like a black peat bog. If not that then a Hutt-style slime bath? Either one.

The droid stammered half-heard and half-hearted excuses at every point of contention. It was programmed to consider all humans as humans and this Arkanan Senator kept violating that programming with every demand. The Arkanans didn’t even keep a droid it could corroborate with. Instead it logged every complaint, every demand, every change into its memory.

It shuffled off as the Arkanans ignored the table and chairs entirely, instead kneeling and sitting and laying on the bare floor to eat.

*****

Tap tap tap. Tap tap tap.

Carise looked over at the door. It sounded like a droid was tapping at her door. But the Senate wasn’t in session today. There hadn’t been a session of the Senate since her introduction at the soiree. 

It had been long enough for a few of her demands to be met. The dining table was gone, picked up by three humans who looked shadier than one might expect in the Senate, associates of the Senator from Tatooine. She was always willing to help a Tatooian make something unpleasant disappear, they were good at that. They even took the chairs and most of the bread-based human foods as well. If they profited and where the offending articles of furniture ended up she didn’t need to know.

At least it gave the droid its excuse to provide her with a proper table, one low to the floor. Her two attendants lounged around it at the moment, eating their meals of nerf flank and mushrooms braised in wine sauce. Carise lay on a divan with a datapad in hand, her own meal settling in her stomach. She raised an eyebrow and snapped her teeth. Evan moved in response, rolling onto his belly then onto all fours. A few steps on his hands and feet allowed him to push off to stand on two feet by the time he answered the door.

“Oh, oh my goodness, Princess Leia he’s undressed.”

Lady Carise sat up and placed her datapad under the cushions of the divan. Evan wasn’t undressed, he wore his straps and a pair of soft fungal-weave pants that clung to every curve on his lower body. Dari was dressed much the same, though he’d taken to wearing shoes around this planet after stepping on the waste pile of someone’s pet. 

Carise tried to drape her silks in a more modest way, shifting in her own straps to try and force the silk to cover her right breast. The silk wouldn’t fall that way and she gave up, leaving it tastefully uncovered to show the scant few spots she could flush. Or perhaps they were moles. She put on a neutral expression as she stood up and nodded for him to show her guests in.

A gold protocol droid shuffled in, hands up as though unsure if it should be covering its eyes. A blue R2 unit rolled in, chirping like a hungry pup expecting to be fed. Behind them both stood Princess Leia Organa.

Without a soiree to attend Leia’s mourning wools were less obtrusive, cut finer like a black and gray cloak. Her eyes met Carise’s and then quickly looked away, unnerved by Carise’s nearly black stare and one uncovered breast. Leia’s gaze tried to find something that wasn’t strange or undressed, instead focusing on a spot on the wall. 

“Senator Organa,” Carise greeted. “This is an unexpected surprise. Please, come in. To what do I owe this visit today?”

Leia glanced around the room again. Aside from the divan and the desk there were no chairs in the main room at all. Instead pillows piled the floor, including around the low table where the two attendants were already clearing up their meals and moving to the kitchen. “I feel somehow we got off on the wrong foot at your introduction,” Leia allowed. “The Chancellor had a whole speech planned out for you to listen to.”

Carise rolled her eyes, knowing Leia wouldn’t be able to see the motion. She moved to the desk, fishing her yellow lenses from their case. She pulled them on. “I’m sure she’d rather offend me in front of an audience instead of merely in public,” she drawled.

“She never meant to offend you.” Leia found she relaxed as soon as the yellow lenses covered Carise’s black eyes and she wondered if that was what they were for.

“Her attempt to fold Arkanis back into some _'Homo sapiens_ only' club is offensive. Her insistence on our humanity nearly poisoned my attendants.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t that bad,” Leia began defensively.

“She overrode my orders concerning our dietary restrictions,” Carise snapped. “She didn’t take me seriously. If the Chancellor of the Senate isn’t going to take me seriously when I tell her plants and grains are poisonous to me and mine, how can I trust she’ll take me seriously on planetary matters?”

The gold droid tapped Leia’s shoulder. “Excuse me, Princess, but what should R2 and I be doing?”

“I’m sure the Senator has a droid you can talk to, 3PO,” Leia said dismissively.

“I do not,” Carise said. At Leia’s confused look she elaborated. “Arkanis is a boggy planet, we don’t keep droids.”

R2 squawked and whirred before rolling outside.

“R2 says Dagobah was more than boggy enough and he will wait outside.” C-3PO seemed to read the room, or perhaps Carise was growling sub-harmonically and the droid picked up on that. “I believe I will join him.” The droid shuffled out of the apartment.

“We don’t keep a lot of things,” Carise said. “Including plants.” She gestured toward the open apartment. The low table and all of its pillows was open, as was the divan. Leia moved toward the table, slowly lowering herself to the floor. Carise followed, gracefully folding down and curling in a lounge.

“So I gather Leopold wasn’t exaggerating when he called you all ‘monsters in the darkness’,” Leia allowed.

“That’s what happens when the galaxy assigns a foreign human to represent a planet of nonhumans, the human decides he owns the place and begins insulting the natives.”

“The last galactic census showed over 40 million humans on Arkanis,” Leia defended. “Don’t they need representation?”

“That number is a misleading lie,” Carise warned. “You’re Alderaanian, you know it’s a lie. That census insisted we both be counted as human against our will and why? Because we both evolved from humans?”

Leia wouldn’t look Carise in the eye. Her hand went to her neck. Below the heavy collar of her mourning wools she could still feel them, the biomechanical gills her father allowed her to have implanted for her 16th birthday. The skin had long overgrown them, rendering them useless, but she refused to have them removed. They were a reminder of all she’d lost.

“The last galactic census was an erasure,” Carise continued. “It attempted to homogenize us both, to turn us both into Coruscanti humans to make it easier to draw a line between humans and nonhumans. Otherwise the Core would have to admit humans might not be the bastions of civilization they believe themselves to be.”

Carise glanced back to the kitchen where her attendants waited, twitching her ears. They nodded and moved back inside, preparing some basic refreshments.

Leia considered Lady Carise’s words. “Calling myself human was odd,” she admitted. “I’m the Princess of Alderaan, even if there are only 60,000 of us. I shouldn’t have to erase that.”

“Only sixty thousand? You don’t count the expats?”

Leia snorted. “What expats? The Empire hunted us down. They’re dead.”

“The last time the Regency ran a census we found 65 thousand Alderaanian expats on Arkanis alone,” Carise revealed. “A few thousand more on the Regency worlds. My own grandmother was an early expat. The New Republic would know this if they hadn’t forced everyone to call themselves humans.”

Leia leaned back on her hands in shock. The population of Alderaanians in the galaxy might have more than doubled and…

Dari brought in a tray, laying it on the table. Evan followed with a bottle of Arkanan spore wine and two glasses. He poured.

Carise slid one glass toward Leia.

“You’re… a quarter Alderaanian,” Leia said.

Carise grabbed and squeezed her own upper arm. “It explains why I can never lose those last 10 kilos.”

“They’re on Arkanis.”

Carise saw the oddly blank look in Leia’s eyes, the look of someone who’s entire world had just changed. “Most of them still consider themselves Alderaanian,” she revealed. “Physically, culturally, emotionally. But politically they left Alderaan. They've been leaving Alderaan since the High Republic. Alderaan and Arkanis used to do great things together and Arkanis has always remembered that. I suppose Alderaan forgot that during their Republic of a thousand years.”

Leia looked down at the table before her. A flute of some pale blue-white wine sat before her. Lady Carise held her own flute of wine. Between them sat a small tray of what looked like mushrooms stuffed with cheese. She took the flute and gazed up at Lady Carise then up at the Arkanans who served her.

Carise looked up and chirped, giving permission.

Both Evan and Dari moved, slinking around to Leia’s side of the table. They easily sank to their knees, flanking her, and leaned in to nuzzle.

Leia jumped at the strange purring thrum all around her. She realized it came from the throats of the two men who leaned in close, pressing their faces into her hair and neck. They nuzzled her, purring as they edged closer, close enough to wrap their arms around her.

Hands slid under the topmost layers of her mourning wools, finding the soft white dress of a Princess of Alderaan beneath. Evan pulled the mourning wools from her shoulders, folding them expertly as he took them away while Dari draped himself over her and nuzzled, his hands sliding up her arms to her neck.

Leia shook her head. “Wait, this is...,” she started.

“Is it too forward?” Carise asked. “I don’t want you to be uncomfortable. We Arkanans can be very tactile.”

“This isn’t…”

Carise chirped and then purred herself.

“The Lady allows us to comfort you,” Dari said, moving to Leia’s right side. He slid an arm around her belly, holding her close as he nuzzled her neck.

“You’re distressed and hopeful and afraid and so overwhelmed,” Evan said as he knelt down on Leia’s left. He laid his neck against her shoulder and purred. “Your emotions have a scent to them, strong and chaotic and unbalanced and alone. We want to help you balance that scent. This is only how we attend to the Lady, nothing more. That’s all we offer.”

“We’ll stop if you ask,” Dari promised. “We’ll do more if you ask.”

“Within limits,” Evan warned.

“Yes, within limits.”

Leia slowly came to the realization that she had two half-naked men plastered to her, purring over her, nuzzling her, and asking nothing of her but the right to serve her. The population of the Alderaanian Diaspora may have just doubled due to an accounting error on the New Republic’s fault. There was a glass of wine in front of her.

She reached for it and raised it in a toast. “To great things together,” she said.

“To Alderaan,” Carise agreed.

“To Arkanis,” Leia concluded. She drank deeply of the strange musky wine with the hint of bitterness.

This was only the beginning. Leia Organa felt something rise in her chest that she hadn’t felt since the frantic message from Luke.

Hope.


End file.
